Train to Concord Back on Track

I am thrilled to report that the University of Illinois Press has officially confirmed that they are going to publish my book Essays After a Sonata: Charles Ives’s Concord.

Here’s what happened. Yale UP doesn’t have a music series anymore. Nevertheless, a humanities editor there liked the idea of my book and accepted it, some three years ago. Naturally, he left. I had broken my own rule: Never approach a publisher until a book is virtually finished. Editors rarely stay at one publisher for the amount of time it takes to write a book. I don’t know why, but editors and publishers play a game like musical chairs. One former editor calls me up offering to do a new edition of American Music in the Twentieth Century every time he lands at a new publisher, which seems like about every two years. And the new editor is likely to have completely different interests and criteria. Out my my six books, three have now gone to a different publisher than I started out with for pretty much that reason.

Anyway, a new, inexperienced, surly, and non-musically-savvy editor inherited my manuscript. I could tell from her first week she wasn’t interested. She kept throwing up hurdles in my path. She sent it to terrible readers. Finally, I challenged her to explain why my defense against the readers wasn’t sufficient and to detail what changes she wanted and why. Didn’t hear from her for months. In the meantime I approached my lovely former editor for my Robert Ashley book. She was all enthusiasm. She sent it out to two readers who basically had no complaints whatever, just unadulterated praise. (I suspect they were not musicologists, but one a composer and the other a pianist who’d played the Concord.) Part of being an editor is knowing whom to send the manuscript to; you need two professionals to sign off on it, not to give the author pretentious advice on how to write his sixth book.

Anyway, the Yale editor finally, in May, sent an email saying the book was accepted. I told her I had another publisher interested, and that if she wanted to get out of this contract, as she manifestly did, this was her chance. She jumped at it. It was the fastest I’d ever heard back from her. I returned my $750 advance, which I thought was a totally unfair demand on Yale’s part, but I would have paid more than that to get out. And I afterward heard that that editor is leaving Yale UP for a publisher I’ve never heard of, so I gather that I wasn’t the only one unhappy with her. If only she’d left a few months sooner.

So – following a totally pointless eight-month delay, Essays After a Sonata is back on track. I made none of the substantial changes demanded by the Yale readers. They accomplished nothing, except to make me change publishers. Despite years of booing and hissing from the musicological community (including being turned down for three years’ worth of NEH and ACLS grants), my book will come out exactly as I intended it.

NEH grants are the Drano enemas of the music world. Easley Blackwood applied for an NEH grant to write a book about microtonal tunings and compose Twelve Microtonal Etudes For Electronic Music Media to illustrate the theory in the book. He got turned down because the referees said the project was “too focused on research” and they wanted to fund a creative musical project. So Blackwood changed the focus of the grant request and resubmitted it as an NEH grant to compose twelve pieces of microtonal music and incidentally write a book to explain what was going on in the compositions. They turned him down because they said the project was “too much of a creative musical effort” and they were looking for something more research-oriented.

Interesting to read your blogpost in view of an article the other day in The Guardian lauding Yale University Press at the top of a list of the world’s best academic presses.

Here’s the lede:

“…The mainstream may be getting dumber by the day, but we are living in what looks like a golden age of publishing for, of all people, the university presses.

At the moment, I don’t think there’s a trade publishing house producing high-calibre, serious non-fiction of the quality and variety of Yale University Press; and snapping at its heels are Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Cambridge and Chicago. …”

The treatment you received from Yale in demanding the return of such a munificent advance is, to say the least, a counterweight to all that praise. It also tells me I should consider the $500 advance I’m to receive from a small arthouse publisher for an upcoming book right in line with value placed on authors in such a “golden age” as ours.

KG replies: I guess even a great publisher gets a bad editor from time to time, but I got no evidence that anyone was monitoring her. A friend even talked for me to a former top editor at Yale to find out what was going on with her (inept, he agreed), but it was represented to me that there was nothing I could do. My first (and now only) book with Yale I did with my old friend Jonathan Brent and that was a blast, but he left there just before it came out. Just glad it’s over.

1. Cannot wait to devour this valuable and necessary book.
2. if a successful author who is a proven expert on the subject that he has written all of his books about gets an advance that is less than what the editor spends on lunch in a month, well, glad I’m not a writer. ..ha

I’m sure there’s a queue of future readers of this book who share your relief at the news., as I do. Your experiences make me wonder how ANYTHING worthwhile gets into print.
All the best – and also, thanks again for alerting me to Lubica Maric. I finally managed to get hold of the four CDs issued in Serbia – she really was something special.
Richard Leigh

Kyle Gann

Just as Harry Partch called himself a "philosophic music man seduced into carpentry," I'm a composer seduced into musicology... Read More…

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